Pearl S Buck: Forgotten Diamond
The Nobel Prize for Literature is
generally recognized as the most prestigious
of literary awards; it recognizes life-time achievement on a global
scale. Although a rough dozen American authors have won this award, only two of
them have been women: Toni Morrison and , decades before her, Pearl S Buck.
Now, we do no service to any artist in any
genre by categorizing their work with a one word label, and Buck was aware of
this when she wrote three novels set in America; in the introduction to a
volume that collects these novels together (John Day, 1958), Buck discusses
both why she wrote the work with American settings, and why she used the alternative
name of John Sedges—fully acknowledging her audiences' expectation of her as
being "the old self, the Asian self”. Yet, Buck’s three American novels are
brilliant, showing a profound understanding of American culture, of American
character, that is illuminating despite the sixty odd years that have passed
since Buck’s eye was cast upon us, thus.
Buck’s writing in and of itself has a
subtle and powerful beauty that may seem as foreign to modern readers as her
works with other settings—for modern literature has taken a terse
superficiality that reminds one of franchise food—a poor, nutritionally vapid
imitation of a truly fine experience. In
Voices In The House, the New England setting, the upper class characters are so
precisely yet compassionately drawn, that readers who have never experienced
this aspect of American culture will see the veil lifted. At one point, the
rising action of the plot is further complicated by the arrival of a dog, “a
huge black dog of an unknown breed” who
is “immense” and who “eats two pounds of meat at a meal” (377). The dog serves the novel’s story as a symbol
of violence that becomes ever more difficult to control, and a counterpoint to
the studied, generations-bred demeanor of the central characters. Buck clues us to this counter-point when:
A moment later the dog felt
itself pushed through the door into the
cold and the door was locked upon him. It flung its body against the
door, bellowing, and this was the noise that William now heard, the uproar, the
howls of a wild animal, and then he heard the dreadful sound of clawing upon
the oaken front door, the pride of the house, the door so old that tradition
said it had come from a massive oak on the mountain side, already hundreds of
years old when the Winston family settled here in Vermont (385).
Buck’s
use of the alliterative name for her primary character, the consonant pattern
of l to paint the character of the dog
in contrast to the assonant o that gives
the door—an object—a value to the characters perceivable to the reader, and a
sense of how the setting of the family home as an established entity –these all
paint for the reader a sense of culture that is probably still as entrenched in
American culture as it was a hundred years ago when the novel was set.
Two of the three “John Sedges” novels are set
in the northeastern terrain of our country, and the sense of an isolated and
hierarchical culture is clear yet compassionately, sensitively drawn. This is
Buck’s brilliance, for the novels she
had set in China, in Korea, in India are also sensitive to the
point of view of characters in a clearly specific setting, as well as the
cultural expectations and traditions within which the characters live.
Buck’s novel The Townsman is primarily set in Kansas,
although the characters emigrate there from England
at a time when Kansas
was becoming settled. Buck’s detailed vision of sod houses, of the disparity
between character personality types, of the eventual growth of the area, are a
precise vision of the prosaic details of this existence that are often glossed
over by American history itself.
It becomes ironic that Buck herself is
passed over by so many of those who read: her work is so sensitively drawn that
anyone reading The Living Reed, set
in Korea, will have a far more profound understanding of Korean culture than
any discussions provided by modern journalistic media. Our modern treasure, Ha
Jin, a Chinese émigré, in his Nankin Requiem, paints the horrors of the
Japanese invasion, but Buck was ahead of him by a few decades in Dragon Seed.
It may be that Buck is read by some writers, but being the brilliant gem of
American literature that is only seen by a few makes her work similar to that
of a masterful painting held in a private collection, admired by a few selected
guests. Buck ought to be required reading, and any person who prides themselves
on their intellect ought to be familiar with her work in canon.
Buck
is an American treasure whose work deserves a readership in each any every
decade of our culture.
You
can find some of Buck's work on Amazon.
